The United States supports India’s efforts to conserve its endangered national animal.

From some 45,000 at the turn of the 19th century to about 1,400 now—that’s the drop in the number of wild tigers in India. Poaching, loss of habitat and human-tiger conflict are among the reasons for the decline.

At a reception at his residence in late November 2010, Ambassador Timothy J. Roemer highlighted the ongoing collaborative efforts between the United States and India to preserve and protect India’s tiger population. Aaranyak, Tiger Trust, WildAid, the Global Tiger Forum and Satpuda Foundation are among the organizations working in India that received support from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2009 for legal training, TV and billboard campaigns, exchanges and tiger monitoring. U.S. support for tiger conservation efforts in India totaled more than $1 million in the past five years, including about $300,000 in 2009 alone, in addition to leveraged funds from other sources.

“The U.S. and India are working together to preserve and protect the tiger, an iconic symbol of India and one of India’s most precious resources. I applaud the work that our two governments continue to do,” Ambassador Roemer said at the event, attended by Minister of Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh and others interested in wildlife conservation. “I want the people of India to know that the U.S. stands ready to do even more to ensure that the tiger population in India will flourish and thrive for generations to come.”

The United States and India have worked together for years to conserve the tiger. In 1994, the U.S. Congress passed a law to establish the Rhinoceros and Tiger Conservation Fund. Grants are awarded from this fund for anti-poaching programs, habitat and ecosystem management, development of nature reserves, wildlife surveys and monitoring, management of human-wildlife conflict, public awareness campaigns and other conservation efforts related to rhino and tiger survival across the world. The fund is implemented by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service.

A factsheet from the service notes that tiger body parts are still in high demand on the global black market as its organs and bones are used in Asian medicines. The tiger’s pelt, too, commands a high price. WildAid, a nonprofit organization with its head office in San Francisco, California, works to reduce the demand for endangered species products through public service announcements. Its celebrity campaigners have included movie stars Harrison Ford and Jackie Chan, who appeared in video appeals to stop buying endangered animal products, and Olympic swimmer Amanda Beard, who spoke against overfishing sharks and buying shark fin soup.

In India, WildAid works with Sanskara Development Trust to promote wildlife conservation through communication. In February 2009, large backlit posters and LCD monitors with the messages, “Stop the illegal wildlife trade,” and “When the buying stops, the killing can too” were placed at 32 airports, including New Delhi and Mumbai. Similar posters were also put up at 20 New Delhi Metro stations last summer.

WildAid and Sanskara have also produced TV and radio spots, which could reach most of India’s population, says Tykee Malhotra, chief representative of WildAid in India. In the past, the English and Hindi videos about India’s forests, wildlife and forest guards have featured cricketers Sachin Tendulkar and Saurav Ganguly and actors Amitabh Bachchan, Shahrukh Khan, Shashi Kapoor and Naseeruddin Shah.

WildAid and Sanskara recently released a catchy, 30-second jingle, sung by Kavita Krishnamurthy and Abhishek Ray, about the tiger’s role in maintaining ecological balance. The jingle, made with support of the Ministry of Environment and Forests and the National Tiger Conservation Authority, can be viewed on YouTube. Another half-minute TV spot featuring actress Sushmita Sen has also been prepared for broadcast.

A major aspect of protecting animals is ensuring that poachers are prosecuted. To this end, Tiger Trust India gives legal training to forest officials in Rajasthan and Assam for “hunting the hunters.” The aim is to help them make strong cases against wildlife criminals.

Participants are taught about the wildlife laws by practicing lawyers, retired judges, forensic scientists and veterinary doctors. As part of the training, “they have to prepare cases on the basis of given facts of the crime and prepare the entire case, which includes detection, investigation and implementation of the provisions of the acts. They have to fill up the relevant forms, which are corrected by the faculty,” says Anjana Gosain, a lawyer and honorary secretary of Tiger Trust. Participants are also taught to give evidence as witnesses for the prosecution and  to face cross-examination by the defense counsel. Gosain says the programs have helped forest staff in Rajasthan develop better skills in writing and preparing cases. “There have been seven convictions in Sariska Tiger Reserve in the past two years,” she says.

Each year, Tiger Trust also supports a visit by students of Clemson University in South Carolina to the national parks and tiger reserves in India. Clemson University’s association with Tiger Trust goes back to 2003, when the university invited Pradeep Sankhala, who was in charge of the trust, for a five-day period over Earth Day. He gave a public lecture on tiger conservation in India and met with classes and student groups. “He invited us to visit India and we were able to go the next year with students,” says David Tonkyn, associate professor of biological sciences, who leads the team to India, along with Louis Bregger.

“Tiger Trust has hosted medical clinics and theater programs about conservation for tribal people near the tiger parks, which we were able to witness, and we have jointly sponsored a number of programs with village schoolchildren living near the parks,” says Bregger, who is director of international student programs. “At these school programs, we have donated large amounts of school materials to the children and their teachers. Our students have played games with and performed songs and skits alongside the Indian schoolchildren.”

“Many of our students have told us afterwards that this was the most rewarding experience of the whole trip. Better, even, than seeing a live tiger up close,” Bregger adds.

“We have taught a class each spring for the last seven years called ‘Biodiversity and Conservation in India’ that introduces students to the natural and cultural history of India, and some modern challenges,” says Tonkyn. They were due to visit India again in March.

“For natural history, we have always vis­ited at least two tiger parks, first Bandhavgarh and Kanha, and more recently Ranthambore and Bandhavgarh,” says Bregger.

The students are up before dawn and enter the parks by 6 a.m. The parks are closed during midday, to reduce disturbance to the animals, and they use those times to observe medical clinics or visit tribal schools in the neighborhood. In the afternoons, they reenter the parks to see wildlife.

“This is a life changing experience for many of our students. As a result of this experience, we have had students return to India as naturalist interns, others have joined the Peace Corps or entered graduate programs in wildlife biology, and one even received his M.S. in environmental and wildlife photography,” says Tonkyn.

“Many of the more than 100 students we have taken to India have returned to Clemson and become activists in our own tiger conservation organization, called Tigers for Tigers, since Clemson University’s mascot is the Royal Bengal tiger and our students consider themselves tigers!”

A September 2010 study singles out India as the most important country for tiger conservation. Published by the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit organization with headquarters in San Francisco, California, it talks about 42 global source sites, “so termed because these areas contain concentrations of tigers that have the potential to repopulate larger landscapes. …These 42 sites contain almost 70 percent of all remaining wild tigers….”  The biggest number of these source sites—18—are in India.

U.S. support for efforts to save the tiger occurs throughout India. In Assam, Aaranyak is working on monitoring wild tigers in Orang National Park and Kaziranga National Park. “The park managements urgently require reliable and scientifically gathered population data of tigers and prey animals” to design a conservation plan, says M. Firoz Ahmed, coordinator of Aaranyak’s tiger research and conservation initiative. 

Because each tiger has a unique stripe pattern, Aaranyak was able to identify, count and monitor the activity of individual tigers by placing an infrared monitor and two cameras, facing each other, at intervals in the forest, capturing the animals on film. Ahmed adds that Aaranyak is also working to train local scientists and foresters in long term tiger monitoring.

In Maharashtra, the Satpuda Founda­tion conducted a workshop on “Education as a tool for species conservation with a focus on the tiger in India,” in November 2009. One of the collaborators was the American nonprofit organization Enviro­nmental Education and Conservation Global.

“The primary goal of the course is to train educators in the use of educational campaigns as an effective and practical tool for solving environmental problems. A second goal of the course is to develop specific educational resources for use in tiger conservation in India,” says Kishor Rithe, president of Satpuda Foundation. Participants came from four Indian states, besides Nepal, Bangladesh and Thailand.

In classroom sessions at S.G.B. Amravati University, they learned about conservation, and on field trips to the Melghat Tiger Reserve and the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve they applied their knowledge. The participants were also encouraged to produce materials for educational programs on the tiger. The next course is scheduled for early 2012.

U.S. support has also helped Indian forest officials add to their knowledge and skills. In March 2010, a group of natural resource managers spent two weeks at Colorado State University to learn about protected area management, human-wildlife conflict mitigation and conservation. These 32 Indian Forest Service officers  are charged with protecting a diverse array of lands and wildlife, including the Bengal tiger.

This training program was carried out under a memorandum of understanding signed in 2008 between the university and the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun, Uttarakhand. U.S. organizations supporting the program included the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, Denver Zoo and the Colorado State Forest Service.

The participants received a combination of classroom and field work experience on topics including ecotourism and visitor management, conservation finance, park and reserve management and North America’s model of wildlife conservation, among many others. They visited the Laramie Foothills, Red Feather Lakes area of the Roosevelt National Forest and Rocky Mountain National Park, in Colorado.

“The most important thing I saw was how so many agencies are working toward conservation in America. And they seem to be working in tandem, involving practically all sections of society,” says Dhananjai Mohan, professor at the Wildlife Institute of India. Though he was a co-organizer, Mohan says that “it was all new for me out there. I was actually more like a trainee learning a lot about America’s conservation scenario.”

In a video on the university’s Web site, Indian participants and the American organizers shared their experiences. “So many of today’s conservation challenges and opportunities are about people. If we think about problems like…loss of biodiversity and human-wildlife conflict, these are global problems and they are largely rooted in social factors,” says Tara Teel, associate professor at Colorado State University’s Human Dimensions in Natural Resources Unit. “So, if we look to the future and think about how we can come up with effective solutions for a lot of these problems we really need to think about social considerations.”

“Definitely, when I go back…I’ll be spreading these ideas of whatever I have learnt,” says Deepa D. Nair. “Basically, I’m carrying back a lot of inspiration.”